THE SECOND BRUNEL.* ELEVEN years have passed since the deaths
of Brunel the younger and the younger Stephenson, about the same time. Both these accomplished designers and constructors of great mechanical works of utility were the sons of men who had done great things in that line. George Stephenson, who made the first railway and loco- motive for passenger traffic, and Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, who invented machinery for dockyards and built a tunnel under the Thames, are examples of original creative genius. Their two successors, trained in their fathers' service, and entering fully into their labours, afford instances of consummate practical ability, which the paternal success directed in a certain path. The first Stephenson and the first Brunel were great engineers by the bent of nature. Natural gifts raised the former up from the drudge of a Newcastle colliery, and turned the latter away from his intended profession, the Catholic priesthood, and his trial of the French Navy. The second Stephenson and Brunel were great engineers from the prudent application of high intellectual powers and of a conquering energy sustained by self-confidence to pursuits in which hereditary connections promised them a splendid reward. They fairly earned by vast personal efforts, more especially in early life, all that they obtained of fame or fortune. But it is not improb- able that either of them might have won as much renown in some other calling, perhaps as a lawyer, statesman, or soldier, if their choice had been turned by family circumstances and counsels in any of those ways. Each was gifted with a large share of that capacity for doing, or rather of promptly seeing and deciding how to do, which is practical cleverness, and is the glory of modern craftsmen.
The late Mr. Brunel, who died in September, 1839, in the fifty- fourth year of his age, had achieved several prodigious things, in the measure of their time, but at a serious cost to shareholders, and with dubious chance of profit. The blame of a reckless ambition and selfish love of glory was not deserved by his conduct, yet he cannot be altogether praised. Greater is the public benefit of a course guided by moderation, and by scrupulous calculation of money to be spent for others, seeking its due return. Joseph Locke, whose estimates were never exceeded, and wise old Stephenson, who opposed the multiplication of lines that would not pay, were more valuable servants to the country, as well as to the companies which employed them. The example of Mr. Brunel is one scarcely to be recommended for imitation in this respect. Yet his moral courage, upheld by the sense of his strict integrity and disinterested purpose, made him claim the full responsibility of those measures which proved most unlucky as pecuniary ventures. He never would allow any other scientific adviser, any contractor, or any of
* The Life of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Civil Engineer. By Isambard Brunel, BAIL, of Lincoln's Inn, Chancellor of the Diocese of Ely. London: Long:m.11s.
his directors to be supposed to share his responsible authority in the execution of works entrusted to him. The introduction of Messrs. Clegg and Samnda's atmospheric traction on the South Devon Rail- way was procured by the active exercise of his influence ; but after trying it a few months, in the year 1847, he advised the company to. give it up, and refused payment for his services. In the case of the Great Eastern steamship, he was specially appointed, in 1832, engineer to the Eastern Steam Navigation Company, for the express purpose of building such a large ship. As for the broad gauge of the Great Western Railway, it was he who put it there ; but tbe financial difficulties of that concern have been occasioned less by this peculiarity in its lines, than by its competition and litigation with other companies for the traffic of neighbouring districts. Bearing these considerations in mind, we should acquit the engineer of having betrayed his employers into runious extravagance ; but it was not always safe to rely upon his judgment.
In the mind of Brunel, we should say, there was a lack of deli- berative sagacity, with a Napoleonic faculty of executive invention. He had the swiftest perception of methods and means to achieve an immediate object, but a dim conception of principles and of ultimate ends. He saw very quickly bow to do a thing, not whether it was the best thing to do. If the biography under notice were a complete account of his life, the character of Brunel would appear that of a masterly workman, an amiable man, a faithful comrade, kind friend and parent, but not much wiser than others. The impression it leaves is that of energetic cleverness and immense diligence in a very useful and respectable profession. A brief mention of the chief performances in his busy career, which began in 1823, as a lad of seventeen in his father's office, and went on without a pause till his death in 1859, will be enough for the general reader.
The Thames Tunnel, in the three years of its beginning, till the break-down in January, 1828, which stopped its progress for seven years, afforded him a rude but effectual schooling. A youth be- tween nineteen and twenty-two, constantly left in charge of a work so difficult and dangerous, the bold novelty of which drew the attention of the world to its performance, was soon put to the proof of what he had in him. Not merely the details of earth-digging, masonry, and carpentry, which he learnt from a hundred labourers over- looked by him in the Tunnel, but the habits of incessant vigilance, prompt contrivance of expedients, cool presence of mind, and quick decision, were taught in this adventurous toil through the unknown bed of clay, too often mixed with gravel, beneath a great tidal river. It often happened that he could not quit his post for several days and nights ; his temporary home was close by, yet he had little time for rest, and none for amusement, at an age when other young gentlemen might be lounging through the studies and sports of Oxford or Cambridge, with long autumn vacations. Isambard Brunel bad the training of a subaltern military officer compelled by accidents of warfare to take the lead of a brigade in the field. He was as frequently in peril of his life as though he commanded a siege battery assailing an Indian fortress. More than once he saved himself and other men by swimming over the flooded floor of those dismal arches, from the advanced movable frame, or shield, in which the excavators picked at the earth before them, to the open shaft with its stairs. Then he would drop into the river above with a diving-bell, and even quit the machine, holding on by a rope while his breath lasted, to grope and probe the bottom, finding the thin place by sounds made audible below, or measuring holes to be patched with bags of clay and with layers of timber and tarpaulin. The shield invented by Sir Marc Isambard Brunel has been often described. It was a beautifully ingenious and con- venient arrangement to protect the roof, floor, and sides of the tunnel, as well as the workmen, during the building of the massive brickwork in the rear.
The younger Brunel had been appointed resident engineer of the Tunnel works, but took no part in their recommencement in 1835, or their final completion in 1843. What he called "my first child, my darling "—expressions found in his private diary— was the projected Clifton suspension bridge, which he had not, after all, the opportunity of constructing. His design for it in November, 1829, and his appointment, after competition with Telford in March, 1831, to act as its engineer, first gave the young man an independent professional standing. The origin of this scheme was curious enough ; so long before as 1753 a sum of .£1,000 had been left by one Alderman Vick, to accumulate, under trust of the Bristol Merchant Venturers' Society, for the building of a stone bridge over the Avon, between those rocky banks above 200 feet high and 600 feet or 700 feet asunder. Only by a sus- pension bridge, like that over the Menai Strait, did it seem
possible to cross the river at this place, from the lofty down of Clifton to Leigh Woods. The funds raised for the undertaking in Mr. Brunel's hands were not sufficient. Abutments and orna- mental towers were built ; and we remember an iron wire, nearly 1,000 feet long, stretched across the valley, with a hanging basket in which a single person could be pulled over by a rope. In the meantime, from 1841 to 1845, was constructed the Hungerford suspension bridge, in which Mr. Brunel actually carried out the mechanical contrivances to secure constant vertical pres- sure of the weight on the piers, and freedom of horizontal motion for the chains, which he would have introduced at Clifton. It is not uninteresting to remark that when, just after his death, the Clifton Bridge was at length completed, a part of its materials consisted of the chains from Hungerford Bridge over the Thames, removed for the Charing Cross Railway.
The positive achievements of Brunel, during a laborious career of thirty years in the responsible exercise of his profession, may be divided into his work as engineer of the Great Western Railway, or its branches and dependent lines ; and his work as designer of large iron steamships, with other improvements of ocean steam eavigation. His other railway employments in one or two Italian Lines and the Eastern Bengal line were but incidental. But the broad-gauge railways from London westward as far as the extremities of Cornwall and South Wales are the crea- tion of his genius. It requires some acquaintance with the country beyond Bristol to appreciate the boldness of his ideas and his skill in their execution. South Devon. from the valley of the Exe to the valley of the Tamar, with sandstone cliffs washed by the boisterous sea at Dawlish, with several wide rivers to be crossed, and a billowy, tumbling land of hills and vales, leaving nowhere three square miles of flat ground, is full of Brunel's doings ; and so is the line to Milford Haven, with other South Wales lines. The main line from London to Bristol is as straight and level as possible ; the Box tunnel, its only very difficult work, alarmed some geologists for the presumed qualities of the rock, but in this case, as in that of the Thames Tunnel, theoretic knowledge of such a matter was less trustworthy than the proof of actual cutting. It was in 1835 that the Great Western Railway was authorized by Parliament, and Brunel, twenty-nine years of age, could move from a small house in Parliament Street to the large house in Duke Street, recording in his diary at Christmas that he felt him- -self on the way to fame and fortune. His habits and manner of working, both in the office and in the field, his posting journeys to survey the ground, to canvas landowners, to design and super- intend the works, and his skill in negotiating or in baffling opponents before a committee, are described by several friends. Like Robert Stephenson, he was not careful of his health, but neglected his regular meals, sat up whole nights over plans and estimates, and smoked cigars incessantly ; the lives of both men were shortened by these habits of early manhood. The broad- gauge controversy, reckoned next in public importance to the free- trade controversy a quarter of a century ago, is related in one chapter of this volume. Another chapter is devoted to the ex- periment and failure of the atmospheric means of traction, as tried on the South Devon, the Croydon, and the Dalkey lines. Many readers can well recollect the comfortable smoothness, the silence, and the sense of safety with which their train of carriages glided along over a large tube with a longitudinal valve on the top, im- pelled by the air rushing in behind against the piston, in front of which was a vacuum produced by steam air-pumps at the stations. The valve wore out and leaked in some weathers, and cost too much for the system to pay. It might still have been worth while to use it for any steep ascent, where a stationary engine and rope would else be needed. But Mr. Fell's contrivance, lately in use on Mont Cenis, of the two horizontal wheels beneath the locomo- tive, clasping a raised central rail, is more effectual for that pur- pose. A third special railway chapter in this book gives an account of all Brunel's great railway bridges and viaducts, ending with the Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash, near Plymouth, a work of high originality and a triumph of mechanical science.
The best part of his remaining professional history relates to the ocean steamships constructed from his designs, or under his direction ; the Great Western, which was the first to make regular moyages across the Atlantic ; the Great Britain, which was the first large iron steamer, and was furnished with the screw propeller ; and lastly, the Great Eastern, which is so well known at this day. The principle on which Brunel continually recommended larger and larger ships was set forth by him in 1833, when he promised by these means to attain an increased speed with a certain power, because the resistance of the water to vessels does not increase in direct proportion to their tonnage. He proposed a steamer to run from Bristol to New York, as a traffic extension of his steam-road from London to Bristol. Neither the Great Western, which made her first trip in April, 1838, nor the Great Britain, which crossed the ocean in 1845, was what we should now think much worth notice. The chief features of the Great Britain, its material and the propeller, were not precisely novelties, and only Brunel approved their adoption ; but he had thoroughly examined these things, and his opinions were to prevail. The Great Eastern was designed by him, in 1852, for a company established to undertake commercial navigation between England and India, China, and Australia on a magnificent scale. His notion was that they should have a ship big enough to carry her own coals for the voyage from the Hooghly to the Thames ; to do which she must have a displacement of 21,000 tons, and must be 650 ft. long by 80 ft. broad. The Great Eastern, in the actual construction of which Mr. Scott Russell had the chief part, is even larger. Her peculiarities of construction, the transverse bulkheads, double skin, and cellular bottom, are not less deserving of remark. The launch at Millwall, which proved so difficult, and excited so much popular feeling, in the winter of 1857, is separately narrated here. She was shoved into the river sideways, by all manner of contrivances, at the rate of a few inches a day. Brunel's excessive labour, anxiety, and exposure to the cold and rain, in those trying three months, seem to have broken him down. There is little else to be told about him. His dock and pier works at Bristol, Plymouth, and Milford Haven, and his proposals or consultations on various matters, find place in this record, with his opinions relating to the engineering profession, contractors, patents, and other subjects he understood. He was a very able man, endowed in a high degree with the strategic faculty of devising means to effect particular results, or prompt remedies for an unforeseen disaster.
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